Radio Shack plans to sell the iPhone in virtually all of its stores at the end of March, executives said in a conference call this week.

“We are currently implementing several hundred stores per week with a
plan to have the product available in about 3,000 stores by the end of
March,” Julian Day, the company’s chief executive, said in a fourth-quarter conference call transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

Radio Shack has relationships with all four major carriers, and in November 2009 said it would be carrying the iPhone at a limited number of company-owned stores in the New York City and Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas as a trial.

” I
would say that you are correct that we had rolled out only a few stores
during that quarter,’ Day replied to an analyst question. “We just wanted to make sure we had absolutely
everything right, turned out we did. And we are now, as we said earlier,
going full ball, rolling that device out to our stores. But I confirm
that in last quarter, iPhone volumes did not have a significant effect
on our overall outcome for mobility.”

But Day also couldn’t quite say whether Radio Shack would be seen as a preferred partner for the iPhone, and whether it would receive any new revisions to the iPhone as soon as Apple announced them.

“Secondly, to move to your
second question on putative iPhone update device, or whatever, I don’t
have any knowledge obviously of such an update device and I – I wish I
could, but I obviously really can’t provide you with any particular
color on who might or might not end up selling that device. Obviously,
having now gotten the iPhone in our lineup and we do think we’re doing a
good job of it, we would want to represent any hypothetical new device,
but at this – that point, that’s really all I can say.”

Given’s Apple’s infamous retribution for partners who talk out of turn,
such an attitude is probably a wise move on Day’s part. (Possibly the
earliest known example was in July 2000, when ATI preannounced the
Radeon Mac Edition graphics board, before Apple named them as a partner.
Subsequent Macs used Nvidia graphics cards.)